Mobile banking is a fast-growing industry in developing regions. Success stories like M-Pesa in Kenya and GCash in Philippines have shown that people in rural areas can be willing and eager to use mobile banking and money transfer schemes in their day to day lives. However, there have been problems in attempting to extend the services from simple peer-to-pee (“P2P”) money transfers to broader financial services such as savings, remittances, deposits and withdrawals. Various reasons have impeded providing these wide range of services including the following exemplary factors:
First, the circle of trust between the client, agent, mobile network operator and bank needs to be well established. It can be important to provide secure financial transactions, which helps the client feel secure and comfortable enough to use the service. Also, providing secure transactions can lead to an increase in user adoption. Second, the transaction costs of these services should be inexpensive and within the reach of people in lower economic segments and areas. A recent survey across 16 different mobile banking services (CGAP '10), showed that branchless banking is currently only 19% cheaper than traditional banking, while the income gap between developed nations and developing nations can be far greater than 19%.
Third, new business models for branchless banking may need to be pursued in order to provide the clients with a wide range of services, from P2P transfers, savings, deposits and withdrawals, to loans, remittances and insurances. In order to provide such services, new business models that make use of innovative technological solutions, lower the cost barrier, and work with existing agents and service providers (e.g., mobile network operators “MNOs” and/or banks) may be needed.
While there exists watermarking techniques, these techniques tend to be expensive and/or overly complicated. Two prior paper watermarking techniques include: (a) fiber fingerprinting by Metois et al. (N. Salzman E. Metois, P. Yarin and J. R. Smith. Fiberfingerprint identification. In Third Workshop on Automatic Identification, 2002) and Smith (Joshua R. Smith and Andrew V. Sutherland. Microstructure based indicia. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Automatic Identification Advanced Technologies, pages 79-83, New York, N.Y., USA, 1999. ACM), and (b) print signatures by Zhu et al. (Baoshi Zhu, Jiankang Wu, and Mohan S. Kankanhalli. Print signatures for document authentication. In ACM CCS '03, pages 145-154, New York, N.Y., USA, 2003). See also, Ashlesh Sharma, Lakshminarayanan Subramanian, and Eric Brewer. Paperspeckle Part I: Low Cost Paper Watermarking. Submitted, 2009. However, both of the above watermarking techniques are expensive to implement, are overly complicated, and have not been readily adopted.
Thus, it may be beneficial to provide exemplary systems, methods and computer-accessible mediums for facilitating paper watermarking that can addresses the above problems, provide a way to introduce further business models, improve existing market models and lower the overall cost of operation of extending the financial services lower economic individuals and areas.